London-based Mendeley, which calls itself "the Last.fm of research", has announced that it's reached something of a milestone today - claiming 100,000 users and 8 million research papers uploaded to the site in less than a year since its launch. Furthermore, the online database is doubling in size every 10 weeks, says the company.That's pretty impressive stuff and should Mendeley's database continue to grow at the current rate they'll overtake Thomson Reuters' Web of Science, the world’s largest online research paper database, in April 2010.
Location-based marketing platform Placecast has raised $5 million in funding from Quatrex Capital, Onset Ventures and Voyager Capital.Placecast's platform uses proprietary algorithms that weave together location information and other data from audiences across the web, mobile, and email. Placecast then analyzes inventory, segments audiences and targets ads for maximum relevance for advertisers and publishers. Placecast manages all of a publisher's web and mobile inventory, as well as serves targeted ads and messages into outgoing emails.
Have young children? You might want to check this out, particularly if they're taking their first steps on the Web right about now.KidZui, the web browser that's built for kids, is today launching KidZui 5.0, featuring more functionality for parents and children to discover and share the Internet together.
Imagine a world where you sit at your computer and you never go outside. Where you never see another human being. This is the world that sites like Google and Facebook want you to live in.Though they'd never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you're at your computer, the more time you're spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you're being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They'd have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. The only difference is that we'd have a contraption on our arms to allow us to click on the ads being shown every so often.Thankfully, we don't quite live in that world yet. And there are a couple factors pushing us the opposite way from that. Mobile devices are the biggest one. But even that is still just a screen. You may not be chained to a desk using it, but as plenty of people with an iPhone will tell you, you may end staring at this screen even more than you do a desktop or laptop monitor throughout a day. But there's another up and coming factor working against our screen slavery: Location.
Facebook is coming to a PS3 near you as part of the latest 3.10 update, which will be rolled out over the course of the next day. We knew it was coming, but Sony has been vague about exactly when the update would land. Turns out it was sooner than most people probably guessed, coming only a day after the November 17 release of Facebook's integration with the Xbox 360.Here are some of the features listed on the press release Sony just issued about the update:Showcase Trophies: Instantly share trophies you earn in PS3 games in your Facebook stream. Simply sync your PS3 system and easily show off your accomplishments to friends and family.PlayStation Store Purchase Log Publishing: Let friends and family on Facebook instantly know which PlayStation 3 games you've purchased. The PlayStation Store, available to PS3 and PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system owners through PlayStation Network, features over 200 downloadable games, many of which are exclusive to PS3 or PSP system owners, in addition to over 4,000 pieces of add-on game content.Game Event: With a few quick clicks of the controller sharing select game events, progress and statistics is now easier than ever with the Facebook integration.
BREAKING: German media giant Burda has used its digital arm to purchase a 25.1% share in XING, the business social network that is biggest in Germany and competes with LinkedIn. The 1,323,041 shares were sold to Burda by Cinco Capital, the investment vehicle owned by the former XING co-founder Lars Hinrichs. Priced at €36.50 per share, the deal is therefore worth €48.3 million. This makes Burda Digital the largest shareholder in XING.More details to follow
The debate over Droid v. iPhone rages on, but lots more Android surprises are on the way. Get ready for the Google Phone. It's no longer a myth, it's real.The next "super" Android device will almost certainly be a HTC phone that's much thinner than even the Droid or iPhone - The Dragon/Passion. This is the phone the senior Android guys at Google are now carrying around and testing, at least as of a couple of weeks ago. If you're willing to give up the Droid's keyboard, the Dragon/Passion is going to be a really cool phone. It should be fully available very soon.But it isn't the Google Phone. Everything up until now has just been a warm up to the Google Phone.Way more interesting are the rumors we've been hearing for months about a pure Google-branded phone. Most of our sources have unconfirmed information, which we describe below. But there are a few things we have absolutely confirmed: Google is building their own branded phone that they'll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba). There won't be any negotiation or compromise over the phone's design of features - Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google's pure vision of what a phone should be.That's it for confirmed, super-high confidence information, which frankly isn't a whole lot more than we all heard back in late October. But we also have a few more details as well that we've gathered from a number of sources. Everything that follows we still consider to be just well-sourced rumors:
About two weeks after debuting the latest beta build of Opera Mobile for Nokia and other Symbian/S60 smartphones, Norwegian software maker Opera is bringing the latest beta version of its custom mobile browser application to Windows Mobile-powered devices.Microsoft's operating system for mobiles is taking quite a hit lately, having lost one third of its smartphone market share since 2008 according to research firm Gartner.
I don't recall ever paying for a TypePad blog, but apparently I did. I learned this today when I logged in for the first time in years to see that the site I had set up in 2005 was deactivated because my credit card had expired. Lucky for me, I don't have to pay anymore because TypePad has finally launched a free version of the service.TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term "micro-blogging," but that's essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it's a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web.
Career related sites like Monster and others are meant for people who are looking for a specific type of job or area. But what if you don't know what career or job opportunity you want to pursue? Daily Endeavor is a site that's designed to help students and job seekers learn about job opportunities and then decide which career suits their skills and interests.Daily Endeavor's founder Matthew Mahoney says the sites is focusing on content in the social change areas such as education, microfinance and human rights. Ultimately, the site's goal is to profile 100,000 types of jobs over the next 3 years. The site is hinged on getting people to write detailed descriptions, reviews and guides about their jobs and experiences
This afternoon Digg CEO Jay Adelson was interviewed on Fox Business News, where he spoke about the future of Digg and the ways it could potentially cooperate with strugging news organizations. During the interview Adelson made a few interesting comments, some of which contrast with News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch's assertions in an interview conducted earlier today that "people understand that it's perfectly fair that they are going to pay for [news]". Instead, Adelson said that he doesn't think your average consumer is going to be coughing up money for news any time soon. Instead, he thinks that payments will come from content hubs and aggregators, including Digg itself. One way Digg can help, Adelson said, is by helping these news sites with their advertising using techniques similar to the ones Digg has implemented.
The rapid development of interesting web services can be attributed to the ability of each successive builder to create a layer upon what others have built. The existence of APIs and callable web services means that each builder can add value on top. When you combine this with crowd-sourcing, you effectively pour lighter fluid (in a good way) on this layering process. The only remaining element required is a taxonomy to insure that the crowd-sourcing creates content that is structured enough to make sense despite coming from many hands.PublicEarth, a Polaris portfolio company that is launching today, takes the power of API layering, crowd-sourcing, and taxonomy and focuses it on maps. PublicEarth describes itself as a wiki of places, specializing in collecting all those “long tail” places that most other databases tend to overlook.
Thinking about moving your electronic services to the cloud? LiveOffice, an SaaS provider of email archiving and hosting, makes the leap that much easier with the release of their CloudMerge technology--offering email archiving for most cloud email providers on the market. In addition to supporting cloud based email archiving, LiveOffice is able to archive email which is on-premise, thus creating a unified archive for all of your email.A core belief of LiveOffice is that your email archive should be portable. By hosting your archive on their end, customers are able to migrate from their current provider to a cloud provider without having to deal with the possibility of losing precious information. Additionally, if customers are dissatisfied with their cloud provider down the road, they can migrate to another provider seamlessly--while keeping all their emails--due to the capabilities of LiveOffice's products.
Last week we reported on Shakira's decision to use Ustream and Facebook to live stream the debut of her latest music video, Give It Up To Me — a move that's a fairly huge departure from the standard MTV route we probably would have seen a few years ago. Ustream has just given us the stats of yesterday's launch, and it's clear that it drew quite a crowd: over the course of the ten minute live stream, Shakira's video had 95,000 unique viewers during the initial broadcast. And over the course of the last 24 hours, the video has seen a total of over 500,000 views.Ustream says that Shakira video wasn't its most popular of all time — the streams for Michael Jackson's memorial service and President Obama's Inauguration saw much more traffic, with 4.6MM and 3.8MM total streams respectivly. But those streams were both hours long, while Shakira's stream lasted a mere ten minutes. It's also important to note that these viewers were likely more engaged than they would be if they were just staring at the tube.
